'Blindingly dangerous': The big lie about Sydney's true elites

“Who the hell… do you think you are? ... I will be speaking to Gladys Berejiklian in about five, three minutes and if you can’t come to the party Louise you should lose your job.” Even now, the sheer menace of it reverberates.

It’s been a big week for me, a week of people dying and (other) people getting sick, different hospitals in different cities, of intimacy with suffering. In one way, this made it harder to care about a few minutes of tacky but ephemeral light-vomit chucked all over the Sydney Opera House. But still I find it hard to lose the dirty feeling of Alan Jones’ invective, vile even by his standards, which became such a lightning rod for Sydneysiders’ impassioned defence of their city, their arts and their values.

Racing NSW beamed a promotion for The Everest race on to the Sydney Opera House.Credit:Wolter Peeters

For Jones’ attack wasn’t just on Louise Herron, chief executive of the house, or the beloved building she manages, though these were real and nasty. It was an unusually naked attack on order itself.

If someone can have you sacked for doing your job with fairness and integrity rather than perpetuating his own commercial interests; if such a person, making such a threat, commands the public loyalty of our political leaders, we’re in dangerous territory indeed.

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Some note that the whole hoo-ha shows our politicians no longer work for us but for Big Money.

True but, dangerous as that is, the collusion goes yet deeper. For somehow we have swallowed the idea that Big Money loves the Little Guy, so that opposing the commercial juggernaut in any way is itself elitist. This is blindingly dangerous. It’s feudalism. It’s Trump-land, and it’s here.

But let’s go back. If it was publicity they wanted, Alan Jones and Racing NSW chief executive Peter V’landys went adeptly about it. For The Everest horse race - the billionaires’ race with the $600,000 buy-in that it is somehow elitist to oppose, the race in which two runners were sired by a stallion Jones himself co-owns, the race that started it all (and that runs, incidentally, today) - is a race of which no one had heard of until Jones’ bellicosity erupted over the Opera House.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Next Saturday is another race that, although ostensibly dissimilar, is backed on one side by a comparable array of combatants, connivance and unbridled exploitation. Like Everest, the race for Wentworth has big shiny egos, a rich-only entry barrier and, courtesy, in particular, of the Liberal policy on climate, a deterimination to destroy anything and anyone that impedes the almighty dollar

True, Jones apologised, kind of. But as apologies go it was less than convincing, being so conditional as to be barely an apology at all. “I’m sorry about that Louise,” drawled Jones, moving quickly to self-justification. “I was tough ... I wanted the truth.” The noble but misunderstood seeker of truth continued: “To Louise, and to those people who have been offended, if they are offended ... I do apologise. I’m always happy to do that … But,” he added, and we’d felt the but coming, “... we have to question what kind of world we’re living in because you can’t shut down debate.”

There you have it, the implication that the exploitation of public monuments by private commerce is somehow in the public interest, and an enhancement of public debate – as if threatening to have someone sacked were simply expressing an opinion. The clear implication is that any attack on those private interests by what Jones continued to cast as “this latte-sipping mob” is an attack on the public. Wow. That’s bold.

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It was the exact same elision that had popped up in The Daiy Telegraph’s front page when Peter V’landys first attacked Opera House management as elitist for wanting to apply its own policy. “The Opera House belongs to the taxpayers of NSW and not just to a minority of elites,” he said. He declared last month that “red tape” was undermining not just Racing NSW but Sydney itself. Scott Morrison echoed similar sentiments, describing the Opera House as “the biggest billboard Sydney has” and opponents of its commercialisation as “precious”.

This is the same dishonest tactic used by developers to suggest that “red tape” worsens the housing shortage and that the best thing governments can do for the people, therefore, is remove all controls, allowing let-rip development across the city.

The pretence, once again, is that Australia’s rusted-on addiction to coal-fired power is about reducing electricity prices rather than placating Big Mining. As if it’s somehow in the interests of ordinary Australians to hasten the cataclysm that forces millions into migration, starvation and war.

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It’s all the same dangerous lie. Big Money is not your friend. Look around. Twenty years of market-oriented neo-liberal government across the globe has only deepened inequality, so that the non-rich can no longer afford houses, decent education, dentistry, proper medical care or legal redress. A world where to receive even the pitiful unemployment benefit to which they are entitled, people must also endure routine humiliation. A world where the richest 1 per cent are on course to own two-thirds of the world’s wealth by 2030.

The mass Opera House rally and 290,000-signature petition was heartening because, like the mass movement to solar, it suggests we’re starting to call them on it. But know this. Rules are not elitist. Doing your job, being fair and honest, preserving specialness and excellence; these are not elitist. What’s elitist is this clubby, corporate, pseudo-populist bully-boy feudalism that disdains the rules. That’s elitist.

Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based columnist and author who holds a PhD in architecture and several international writing awards. A former editor and Sydney City Councilor, she is also Associate Professor (Practice) at the Australian Graduate School of Urbanism at UNSW. Her books include 'Glenn Murcutt: Three Houses’, 'Blubberland; the dangers of happiness’ and ‘Caro Was Here’, crime fiction for children (2014).